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What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

writings.stephenwolfram.com

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Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#401

Post by kqr »

kilgnad wrote: post #397
kqr wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insisting on using a term directed at that level of generality implies a belief that nothing significant has happened since. Printing press? Just atoms. Cars? Just atoms. Computers? Just atoms. It's very context-dependent but I don't read this as dismissive reduction, I read it as a statement of the incredible generalisability of atoms under the current laws of physics.

Pfft more useless text written by a giant pile of atoms. Pointless. Kidding aside, in the current context of human communication etiquette, to even refer to something as atoms outside of a demonstration or example is a deliberate dismissive reduction.

I see the current context as something narrower, namely a discussion on the technical underpinnings of LLMs.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#402

Post by bottlepalm »

goatlover wrote: post #251
bottlepalm wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Your brain takes in very raw input from air pressure, two eye cameras, chemical sensors, etc.. and reduces that input into a coherent singular experience.. same with reading words, you just 'understand' it, after being trained for many years by your parents and consuming vast amounts of input from your surroundings.

You mean my body interacts with the environment as an organism, so I know what trees and cars and human interaction is, unlike an LLM. Your sensory organs are part of your nervous system. You're not just a brain inside a meat suit.

You kind of are. The 3d coherent world you experience is completely rendered by your brain. The inputs are just 2 cameras waving around. But to you it’s a stable coherent 3d world.

Why do you think a LLM doesn’t know what a tree or car is?

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#403

Post by kilgnad »

tarsinge wrote: post #338
kilgnad wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok let me make this more clear. I choose how to view things, yes this is true. But if I choose to treat human beings as jumbles of molecules, most people would consider that viewpoint flawed, inaccurate and slightly insane. Other humans would think that I'm in denial about some really obvious macro effects of configuring molecules in a way such that it forms a human. I can certainly choose to view things this way, bu…

The paper is discussed by another commenter which brings interesting points how that model is built and it may not be what you think. I agree with what you said regarding how we choose to view things, but I think you also have a bias/belief that you want it to be something more, instead of being more neutral and scientific: we know the building blocks, we have to study the emerging behaviors, we can’t assume the conc…

No I'm with you.

I don't want something more.

But it is utterly clear to me that the possibility that it is something more cannot be simply dismissed.

Literally what I'm seeing is society produces something that is able to pass a law exam. Then people dismiss the the thing as a statistical word generator.

Do you see the disconnect here? I'm not the one that's biased but when you see a UFO with you're own naked eyes you investigate the UFO. In this situation we see a UFO with our eyes and people turn to me to tell me it's not a UFO, it won't abduct me don't worry, they know for sure from what information?

The possibility that LLMs are just a fluke is real. But from the behavior it is displaying simply dismissing these things as flukes without deliberate investigation and discussion is self denial.

Think about it. In this thread of discussion there is no neutral speculation. Someone simply stated it's a word generator even though the root post has a paper saying it clearly isnt. That someone came to a conclusion because of bias. There's no other way to explain it... There is a UFO right in front of your eyes. The next logical step is investigation. But that's not what we are seeing here.

We see what the oil execs did when they were confronted with the fact that thier business and way of life was destroying the world. They sought out controversy and they found it.

There were valid lines of inquiries against global warming but oil companies didn't follow these lines in a unbiased way. They doggedly chases these lines because they wanted to believe it. That's what's going on here. Nobody wants to believe the realistic future that these AIs represent.

I'm not the one that's biased.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#404

Post by zulban »

chimen wrote: post #302

I merely follow the AI news since I'm not operating in the field but, on the "are we there yet" note, how much until AIs will start working on better versions of language models. Ai working on AI let's say.

ChatGPT can already help its programmers to develop itself. However it's hard to say how far it is from taking full control of that process. Probably a ways off.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#405

Post by kilgnad »

qprofyeh wrote: post #311
kilgnad wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok let me make this more clear. I choose how to view things, yes this is true. But if I choose to treat human beings as jumbles of molecules, most people would consider that viewpoint flawed, inaccurate and slightly insane. Other humans would think that I'm in denial about some really obvious macro effects of configuring molecules in a way such that it forms a human. I can certainly choose to view things this way, bu…

That realistic model it builds of the information you are feeding it, if that’s how we measure its intelligence, then why is the answer it gives sometimes so “smart” yet in other instances where the question is simpler it seems “dumb” (provides an incorrect answer confidently)?

Don't know. But the fact that it often produces a "smart" answer is a phenomenon that needs investigation.

You cannot simply dismiss this thing that passes a Google L3 interview and bar exam just because it got some addition problem wrong. That would be bias.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#406

Post by kilgnad »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #365
kilgnad wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's obvious. ChatGPT could be a precursor to a future AI that is more intelligent then humans. I don't think this means skynet apocalypse. I think this means most people will be out of a job. A lot of people on HN take a lot of pride in thinking they have some sort of superior programming skills that places them on the top end of the programming spectrum. ChatGPT represents the possibility that they can be b…

Its ok for you to be enthusiastic! Its natural to want to witness the kind of thing you are saying. I think you are maybe operating out of unconscious desperation though; a loneliness that is really driving this for you, akin to hoping for a nearby earth-like planet. There isn't a lot else in our world that has this seemingly pure and transcendent promise . It allows you to be brave and accepting about something wher…

Uh. No. I don't.

I'm not enthusiastic. I don't want ai to take over my job. I don't want any of this to happen.

I'm also not fighting people. Just disagreeing. Big difference.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#407

Post by kilgnad »

Lewton wrote: post #310
kilgnad wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finally I'm tired of people saying it's just a probabilistic word generator and downplaying everything as if they know. If you said something along these lines before... then these papers show that you're not fully grasping the situation here. There are clearly different angles of interpreting what these models are actually doing but people are stubbornly refusing to believe it's anything more then just statistical w…

> It's our biases and our tendencies that are making a lot of us down play the whole thing. Your brain is optimized for finding patterns and meaning in things that have neither, you're strongly biased in the other direction

Well we have a thing that passes a Google interview and a bar exam.

You're telling me that because I think this is evidence that it's more then a statistical word generator that I'm biased?

Who's the one that has to concoct a convoluted story to dismiss the previous paragraph? Stop yourself when you find out that's what you're doing when crafting a response to this reply.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#408

Post by redleggedfrog »

kilgnad wrote: post #129
spion wrote: post #15

The answer to this is: "we don't really know as its a very complex function automatically discovered by means of slow gradient descent, and we're still finding out" Here are some of the fun things we've found out so far: - GPT style language models try to build a model of the world: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.13382 - GPT style language models end up internally implementing a mini "neural network training algorithm" (…

Finally I'm tired of people saying it's just a probabilistic word generator and downplaying everything as if they know. If you said something along these lines before... then these papers show that you're not fully grasping the situation here. There are clearly different angles of interpreting what these models are actually doing but people are stubbornly refusing to believe it's anything more then just statistical w…

Rather than subconscious fear I have conscious hope. I really hope that such models can be used for improving human life, something, much more really, than what appears to be the trivial uses of Chat-GPT. How about we feed it information on carbon sinks and helps slow down climate change? How do we get people to limit population voluntarily? How do we improve education? Better forest management techniques? I know I'm asking a lot here but this is all its infancy so maybe I'm not being overly optimistic.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#409

Post by geraneum »

codeulike wrote: post #32

Wow this is 19,000 words. I like his summary at the end: At some level it’s a great example of the fundamental scientific fact that large numbers of simple computational elements can do remarkable and unexpected things. And this: ... But it’s amazing how human-like the results are. And as I’ve discussed, this suggests something that’s at least scientifically very important: that human language (and the patterns of th…

> ChatGPT is telling us something about language or thought

There is a leap from language to thought and Wolfram talks about it in more detail in the article in the section named “Surely a Network That’s Big Enough Can Do Anything!”

I encourage everyone to read the full article. It’s more nuanced than “Language is easy”

Here is an excerpt from that section:

  …But this isn’t the right conclusion to draw [certain tasks being to complex for the computer]. Computationally irreducible processes are still computationally irreducible, and are still fundamentally hard for computers—even if computers can readily compute their individual steps. And instead what we should conclude is that tasks—like writing essays—that we humans could do, but we didn’t think computers could do, are actually in some sense computationally easier than we thought.

Re: What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work?

#410

Post by the_gipsy »

IanCal wrote: post #380
the_gipsy wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this is the key bit: They reached into its mind and flipped bits on that internal representation (to change white pieces to black for example) and it responded in the appropriate way when making the next move. Excuse my ignorance, but how is this useful? This seems to indicate only that they found the "bits" in the internal state.

> Excuse my ignorance, but how is this useful? This seems to indicate only that they found the "bits" in the internal state. Right, they found the bits in the internal state that seem to correspond to the board state. This means the LLM is building an internal model of the world. This is different from if the LLM is learning just that [sequence of moves] is usually followed by [move]. It's learning that [sequence of…

I see, thanks. I guess it means that if there was only a statistical model of [moves]->[next move], this would be impossible (or extremely unlikely) to work.
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